The Hearts and Lives of Men by Fay Weldon

The Hearts and Lives of Men Reviews

• 
  George

  3.5 stars. A wacky, oddball, delightful, tongue in cheek, very eventful fairy tale for adults. Clifford and Helen fall in love and marry. They have a baby, Nell. They divorce. Clifford is unfaithful, Helen is too! There is a custody battle and Nell lives with one parent, then the other. Nell is kidnapped. Nell is on a plane that crashes killing all passengers except Nell and her kidnapper. We follow Nell as an orphan. Clifford is loved by a heiress. Helen marries a fine man who fathers more children and bores her. Helen’s father is a famous painter. Clifford is an art dealer who has profited from selling Helen’s fathers’ paintings.
  
  A wild ride of a tale with many ‘dear reader’ smarty asides about the foolishness of humans.
  
  This book was first published in 1987.
• 
  Julia

  I'm never really sure why I like Fay Weldon so much, but I really do. (Pretty much everyone in my family feels the same way.) Her narrator-voice reminds us all the time that there are non-rich people in the world, and they're important too, but her books are mostly focused on the rich and beautiful and annoying anyway. _Hearts and Lives_ is really scattered and weird pacing-wise, but somehow she makes it work. One of those if-you're-good-enough-you-can-break-the-rules things, I guess... But on the other hand, there's lots of inconsistencies, including a few real howlers of the characters-suddenly-on-the-wrong-continent kind, which make me think maybe she just really was sloppy and writing off the top of her head without much editing. But still, still, it works. I think it's the lightness of it. (Not in the 'light fiction' sense -- trashy and unedifying -- but, um, well, Italo Calvino has a list somewhere of the desiderata for writing: 'lightness, swiftness, visibility, multiplicity', and whatever he meant by that, I think that's what I mean.)
  
  Or perhaps I like her for less lofty reasons, like the fact that she refers to people in their mid-thirties as young and talks a lot about how Beautiful People can get away with anything. (I'm one of those People With a Chip on Their Shoulder About Beautiful People.) But I'd like to think it's because she's actually a really good writer.
• 
  Mary Comstock

  I read this book for the first time when it came out in 1989 and returned to it this year to find it just as fresh and funny as it was twenty years ago: a 1960's love story, fraught with complications, endearing idiots and paunchy villains, told in the voice of Jane Austen.
• 
  Suzette

  I have a bias against books where the author addresses me as "Reader" or god forbid, "Dear Reader." I have always had a fondness for Fay Weldon's upper class English feminism, but this book seemed dated.
• 
  Cecilie Jøhnk

  This book is hilarious. Not with a dry and bleak sarcasm like most of Fay Weldon's humour, but with a cornucopia of improbable coincidences, a heroin who is just more beautiful and talented than any other girl around her, and a villain who is just simply bad ... bad, greedy, and horny.
  
  I have heard that Fay Weldon really wanted to end her books badly, but was told to make hopeful endings so that they would sell. I don't know if that is true, but if it was, this could be her way of writing demonstratively unrealistic and happy endings.
  A bit like "Der König reitender Bote", the royal messenger in the end of Brecht and Weill's Three Penny Opera.
  
  It is so funny, AND at the same time I just allowed myself to be happy that the good people were rewarded and the bad people had their coming-up.
• 
  Lauryn Faloona

  LOVE Fay Weldon’s writing, it’s so unapologetic, not trying to please everyone. It was caricature-like in the amount random stuff that happened, it darted between years and then lay on a day or a moment for a whole chapter or five.
  
  All the characters were fleshed out and real but also polar.
• 
  Janis Bobrin

  Not everyone's "cup of tea," but I'm a huge fan of Fay Weldon, her tongue-in-cheek style, and her wry observations about human nature. Good summer read.
• 
  Bronwyn Rykiert

  I really enjoyed this story about Nell and her parents Helen and Clifford. At first I was not sure that I would enjoy it as it written a little differently but I did really enjoy it
• 
  Marina Gleb

  A 60s fairy tale full of wisdom. Enjoyed it a lot.
• 
  Ann Macdonald

  Took me a while to get into it, but when I relaxed into her style of writing I thoroughly enjoyed the experience
• 
  Janet Bird

  Excellent.
• 
  Hilary Rowell

  This book is so much fun! I listened to the audiobook which just added to my immense enjoyment of it
• 
  Sarah

  I simply loved it!
• 
  Sandra

  Ho amato molto Fay Weldon agli inizi degli anni 90, quando la Feltrinelli ha cominciato a tradurla in italiano grazie al successo del film She-Devil. Per un po’ la Feltrinelli e Tea se la sono contesa per poi abbandonarla per inseguire altri successi; ora ogni tanto qualche casa editrice più audace pubblica ancora qualcosa ma mi rimane la sensazione di essermi persa molto.
  Nonostante il titolo, nonostante le recensioni, per me questa non è una storia d’amore o meglio l’amore c’è ma non è il punto focale. Grazie alle intrusioni d’autore, si sa fin dall’inizio che la storia avrà un lieto fine ma la voce dell’autrice si farà beffa dell’amore per tutto il libro, invitando il lettore a meditare su altro, oltre all’amore. Non so spiegare meglio: leggete questo libro perché è bello, punto!
  PS il personaggio di Arthur Hockney mi ricorda tantissimo il Jackson Brodie di Kate Atkinson, altra meravigliosa autrice britannica.
• 
  L8blmr

  This is a difficult book to rate. Had I not seen it mentioned in a nonfiction book I read about reading literature, I would never have known of its existence and I would have missed a treat.
  
  As told by an omniscient third person narrator, who even addresses the reader as ... well, "Reader," this is ostensibly the story of Nell from her conception in the 1960's to her early adulthood in the 1908's. In reality, there is a fairly large cast of characters involved and very few of them are even likeable, much less endearing (Nell herself, by no accident, being the most sympathetic, but almost the least interesting person in the tale). Still, I was compelled to continue, as the author's writing style grabbed me and refused to let me go until the very last pages, when all the individual stories came together in a way that was almost anticlimactic, yet satisfying.
  
  Lots of symbolism for those that enjoy that type of thing, but not so essential that you "get" it to enjoy this book. This was a change of pace for me that I didn't know I needed and I enjoyed it in spite of myself.
  
• 
  Moem

  It took me years to get around to reading this, and then when I did it took me years to finish. After about half of it, I left it alone for months; maybe it's because the fate of a baby and (later) a tiny tot don't interest me all that much. Nell became more interesting to me as she grew up.
  
  The ending of this book can hardly be considered a surprise; the suspense is in how and when Nell and her parents will find each other eventually.
  By the last third of the book I was finally in its grasp. It took a while but it did happen.
  
  The voice of the narrator is very direct, and usually friendly and wise; she tells us the story the way a kind aunt might. Still, she can be sharp, too.
  
  Not a great book, in my view. But well worth reading.
• 
  scarlettraces

  (That has to be the most off-by-a-mile blurb I've seen in some time, btw.) I've a feeling Fay Weldon fell out of favour with the left-wing feminist literary establishment at some point (maybe when she wrote the Bulgari Connection? I know that's about when I stopped reading her latest as a matter of course, though I'm pretty sure that was just coincidence.) But reading this rowdy feminist fairytale from 1987 made me remember how much I liked her - and how much we need this sort of thing shouted from the rooftops - because a distressing amount of things haven't changed a bit since then. The jokes don't hurt, either.
• 
  Madeleine

  "De harten en levens van mannen"
• 
  Georgie O'Dwyer

  So far so good... It was on the bookshelf at Anglesea...
• 
  Jacqui

  boring!! don't let the details get in the way of a good story as they say...